 We're back. We're live. It's the one o'clock rock, okay? And this is research in Manoa. We have one of our favorite researchers from HIGP. And if you don't know what HIGP stands for, it's going to be on the final exam. And I'll tell you again, it stands for the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. It's part of SOAS, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at UH Manoa. Enough acronyms? Yeah. Sarah Fagens, okay? She's a researcher there at HIGP, and she's working on the Mars program. And she's got certain responsibilities based on her, let's say, her volcanic and geophysics background. And she makes instruments and things for the Mars landing scheduled in 2020. And that's very exciting. And every day that goes by gets more exciting. Welcome back to the show, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you for having me back again. So how is your work doing these days? Well, good. As the years roll by, we've been working on this for a few years now. But the schedule of activities and meetings is ramping up. The Mars 2020 mission itself is currently in phase C, which is the construction of all the instruments. So final design, construction of instruments. And then in another couple of years, the instruments will be delivered to Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for assembly into the spacecraft itself. So we've been busy having meetings and discussing what kind of science observations we want to make, discussing our instrument. And the team as a whole and the community as a whole has been trying to choose a landing site to send this mission to. Ah, yeah. One thing, before we go to your slides, and I do want to go to your slides, is that it strikes me that this process is entirely different than, say, the Moon landing in what, 1968, was it? Because you're dealing with hundreds, well, the project, the principal investigator, are dealing with hundreds of people across the world who talk to each other all the time. That's right. It's a very international mission. The rover itself has seven instruments. Each instrument team is tens of people strong. And then these might be drawn from all over the country, all over the world, all over the country and the world, to develop the very best components we can put on the spacecraft. Yeah. So it's really a matter of communication and thus collaboration among all these people who know each other. You were telling me how you were ultimately picked on the basis of some fellow you knew as you met in a scientific conference and the like. Yeah, the PI on the instrument, the Mastercam's instrument I'm working on, used to be a grad student here at the University of Hawaii. And I met him during those days and we've kept in touch. And when he needed a volcanologist for the science team, then he thought of me. See, that's the way it happens. That's the best way, you know, because then you look for excellence. It's based on merit. It's based on what you know about people. And as a result, you get the best result. Okay, so let's do your slides so you can explain to people what you're working on, and especially those three candidates for the landing spot on Mars. Yep. So the 2020 mission, it will be launched out of Cape Canaveral in Florida in the summer of 2020. And then it will have an eight to nine month cruise phase to get to Mars. Mars is about 200 million miles away from Earth. So it takes a little while to get there. It's going to arrive in early 2021. And then this mission is modeled very much on the current Mars Science Lab curiosity mission that's roving around on the surface at the moment. So it's going to use the same entry descent and landing, which as the spacecraft approaches the atmosphere, it'll deploy a parachute to slow it down in the atmosphere. And then once it's slowed down enough, it will have a powered lander, which will slow it down and gently deposit the rover on the surface using this sky crane technique. The rover is lowered on a tether within, you know, 20 feet or so of the surface. And once the spacecraft detects that the ground has been reached, it cuts the tether. And then the powered phase flies away to crash land somewhere else so that it doesn't cause any problems at the landing site in itself. And so this sky crane technique is designed to sort of stop too much dust and debris being kicked up and deposit the rover in a nice fashion. And that third picture reminds me of one of the drones they have at the shop or image store about 500 bucks. I guess it's not that little bit more expensive, much larger than one of those drones. But yeah, yeah. Okay, carry on. And so the mission itself is designed to last a Martian year. That's 687 birthdays. And it has basically four objectives when we get to the surface. The first is to characterize the geology and the habitability of the environment around the land. And we're talking about habitability for possible microbial life that may have developed very early on in Mars' history when it was a much warmer and wetter place. This could be, what do you call it, an antigen, no? It could be something that's not friendly to us. Well, I think what did develop was probably, you know, pretty benign and unable to harm us. I keep imagining Matt Damon out there. What would he do? Well, yeah. I mean, we've got to get all science-y over this mission. So it's just a manned or unmanned? It's unmanned. It's a robotic rover explorer. The second objective of the rover is to look for actual biosignatures, actual signs that life had developed at some point in the Martian past. And the third objective is to, and the first time this has been done actually, is to collect samples of the rock and the soil and store them and catch them on the surface of Mars so that they may later be visited by another mission just to pick them up, bring them home to Earth so that we can analyze them in our labs at Earth. I mean, we've got a lot of very sophisticated instruments on the rover itself, but it'll take analysis in the labs on Earth to really know whether we found biosignatures, the signs of life. Well, to dwell on that for just a moment, you know, we know, and we have learned from you guys at HIGP, that there are only so many elements in the universe. They're all on the periodic table of elements. So you're not going to find any elements out there that are not on that periodic table. This is good. Right. There won't be any surprises. There's been known parameters here. Yeah, known parameters. However, the idea of finding biological life, that's a little different because, you know, all our evolution of biological life on this planet, on Earth, has been on Earth. Does anybody, you know, have any thoughts about whether the biological life you could find on Mars is going to be similar given the same periodic table of elements, you know, to start with? Carbon, for example? Yeah. Similar to what we have here. Or could it be something that is really an invasive species? And when it comes back, serif agents, is it going to be something that you have concerned about? Well, I think there are protections in place to make sure whatever we bring back is very well contained, very well handled. We're gloves, will you? Yeah, that's right. Thank you. Mars actually is really very Earth-like. I mean, it seems kind of like an alien planet, but certainly in the past it was even more Earth-like. We know we're dealing with the same kind of rocks, same, you know, general planetary system. In the past it was warmer and wetter, so we fully anticipate that the kinds of life that may have developed there in the past will be very similar to very primitive single cell kind of organisms that we see on Earth. And there may be some differences, but we don't expect anything radically different. That would be so interesting. You know, I'm a scientist, I want to have first dibs that I want to look at that under a microscope and check out the DNA. Oh, so exciting. Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, there's certainly plenty to be discovered. So we had another reshopper image device on the screen a minute ago. Can you lift the rover? Bringing back the rover. Oh, there it is. That looks really cute. I didn't see that in a reshopper image myself. No, that's right. No, this is actually one of the graphics that the Mars 2020 mission has supplied for us to explain to people. So if you visit the Mars 2020 mission website, you'll find images like this. They're really great images. So this shows the different instruments that will be on board the rover. The Mastcam-Z and the Supercam, they actually are situated on a Mars that rises up to view the environs. And I'm a co-investigator on the Mastcam-Z instrument. The Supercam is kind of a real mega instrument. It's a high-resolution camera. It's a spectrometer and has a laser. And it uses those. That's yours. No, the Supercam actually is my colleagues, Shib Sharma and Anupam Mizra are involved in that. Yeah, I'm on the Mastcam. The Mastcam. Yeah. So those two are on the central mast. And then below that, there's the MEDA, which is the Mars Environment Dynamics Analyzer, which is basically meteorology. It'll take temperatures, humidities, that kind of thing. And then on the arm that sticks out at the front of the rover is the Sherlock instrument, which is a very high-resolution ultraviolet spectrometer and the pixel instrument, which is a planetary instrument for x-ray lithochemistry. And both of those, you can put the instruments right up next to the rocks and they'll analyze the very fine-scale chemistry of the target rocks. It's the most sophisticated rover ever made, huh? Yeah, the instruments have been designed specifically with not only characterized in agility, but with looking for biosignatures. So certainly the Sherlock, the Supercam, they have aspects of them that will be able to say, OK, this is a potential biosignature. We will sample this rock and we'll cache it to be brought back home. So some questions about the rover. How big is it? How long? I mean, how wide? It is sort of car-sized. It weighs just shy of about a thousand kilograms. So it's similar to the Curiosity rover, which is itself substantially larger than the previous rovers, the spirit and opportunity that went before. It looks so vulnerable with all those sensors hanging out to the cameras. I mean, aren't you worried about like meteorites coming down and damaging it? Well, we sort of play the odds there that an actual strike on something that's not that big won't be won't be happening. It is kind of a harsh radiation environment and the temperature environment can be quite extreme, which is why we select, you know, landing sites in areas that are a little bit more benign, but it's designed to withstand, you know, a certain amount of radiation damage and what have you. And our experience with the past rover missions is that these these little guys can keep on trucking for much longer than their design lifetime. Years. Yes. Yes. Many, many years. You leave them there. You don't bring them back. No, they stay there until they decide it's time to go to sleep and not wake up again. They run on solar batteries. The Spirit and Opportunity Rovers were on solar and the Curiosity, the last one, and this are run on a radioisotope generator. So they don't have to be concerned about solar panels or, you know, sunshine. I hate to sound ignorant. What is the radioisotope generator? It's it's a small nuclear powered source. Yeah, with a little bit of uranium in there. It's I think it's plutonium 238, if I remember rightly. Yeah, that's pretty sophisticated stuff. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it enables a much larger rover to be powered. And, you know, you can you can power multiple instruments at a given time. And you're not dependent on the sunlight coming up, the sun coming up to power everything up. So it allows for a lot more versatility. That is really sophisticated stuff. OK, we'll take a short break so we can kind of get our heads together about this and go on to the next step. That is deciding next step. You know, this is the cliffhanger. We're going to decide where to land who right now. Aloha, my name is Joe Kent, and I'm the vice president of research at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. The Grassroot Institute is a public policy think tank. And we try to build a better economy in Hawaii. And you can see us on the TV show A Hana Kako on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcasting Network every Monday at two o'clock. We'll see you there. And let's build a better Hawaii together. Aloha. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Chang, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m., where we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and Aloha and thanks for watching. We're back with Sarah Vajans of HIGP talking about the moon, the moon trip. Unmanned moon trip in 2020. Mars trip. Mars trip, did I say moon? Oh, Mars trip. And that's only three years away. It's coming up quick. Oh, oh, it's exciting. You know, I'm still getting used to 2017 myself. I know. So the big thing is choosing the site. This is really important because you have to build the trajectory, the course, I guess, based on where you're going to go and figure out all the physics involved in that. So what are the candidates and who's advocating for what? Well, the landing site selection process takes place over four to five years. And it involves anybody who's interested in Mars, as long as they can make a scientific case to go to a particular site, can be involved. And then over four or five workshops, the candidate field is whittled down, kind of like planetary survivor. Sites get voted off each time. And we currently, we just had a meeting last month. We went in with eight candidate sites and we're now down to three candidate sites. And people go to these meetings and they they present their case for why we should go to that particular site. Arguments come out. Well, it's it's predicated upon you must you must meet the geological objectives, the objectives of the mission by a particular site. So this graphic here shows this is actually kind of a complicated graphic. But it's a map of Mars. The color coding is the cooler colors are low elevations. The warmer colors are high elevations. And there's a band in the middle where we've got some black and gray. And the band is a latitude band. We need to be able to land in a place where temperature conditions are favorable. So between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south is where we need to land so that we can operate the mission. Then the black areas here are areas that are too high in elevation to land in. When the spacecraft is is coming down through the atmosphere, it needs enough atmosphere to slow itself down. So if it lands too high, the atmosphere is too thin, so it needs to go to lower elevations. And the gray areas are areas that are too dusty that spacecraft needs to land on a solid, competent surface. So those are the engineering constraints. Temperature constraints, altitude constraints, dust constraints. We also need to land in areas that aren't too steep. You don't want to tip your rover over and you don't want to land on top of a rock. So the rock abundance in any particular area has to be less than a certain amount in order to safely, safely land. So if you can present a site that meets the engineering constraints, and also the geological constraints, the mission constraints, we need to go somewhere that would have been habitable, that may have biosignatures, et cetera. So we study these sites from orbit and we try and figure out, OK, was this place a habitable environment? What can tell us whether it's a habitable environment? The morphology, the shapes of the landforms, the mineralogy, the composition of the rocks that we can see from orbit with the current orbital assets that we've got up there. And so it's a lot of work to sort of integrate all of those those aspects into a presentation for a viable site. Yeah, it's not only looking at one location. It's looking at a number of locations and then comparing them on a great number of factors. Yes. So, OK, so now there are three left. You got more slides about the three? Yes, I've got a slide for each of the three. The previous map just showed the red dots were locations of where these sites were. And we're down to three now. And one is a crater, Jezero Crater. It's an old impact crater that we can tell by looking at it would have been filled with water at some point. So water clearly is one of the key ingredients for life. It makes something a habitable environment. And it's flat at the bottom. It's flat at the bottom. So the graphic on the left here shows Jezero Crater. And the little yellow oval is the landing ellipse where the spacecraft would land. And then the solid line, the black line in the rest of the image, that shows the outline of the watershed. That's the area of land adjacent to Jezero that would have drained into Jezero crater. We see some inlet valleys have been outlined there. So it has two valleys that drain into it. So not only would the crater itself with the lake in have been habitable, but if there was life that had developed in the rocks in this large, this is something like 23,000 square miles of a watershed. Oh, the whole watershed. Yeah. If life had developed in the rocks there, those rocks would have been eroded and transported by the fluville, the river activity, and then deposited in Jezero. So not only could Jezero have been inhabited, but you're also bringing extra stuff in, which would have been concentrated in the sediments at the base of the lake here. You're looking for biomaterial to be a great location. Exactly. And there were two other delta sites that were being considered. This one was the most favored. And the graphic on the right shows one of these inlet channels, and it shows one of these deltas, or the sort of the scarf, the scalloped edges, and the scarf at the edge, and the channels on top of it. And looking at the very base of that delta, which is where all the fine grained biotic material could potentially have been deposited, that would be a key place to go and look at. It looks like the green on the golf course. This is a color composite. It's not really green vegetation or anything like that. No, it's not. It's a color composite. And the colors in that image highlights certain compositions of minerals we see on the surface. So the greeny RNG is an olivine carbonate unit. And we think the carbonate, that's a mineral that requires water to alter it. And then the delta itself contains a lot of clay type material, which is very fine grained. That also requires water to form it from alteration of rocks. So if we look from orbit and we see these minerals there, these minerals that must have water involved, that says to us, OK, this may have been a habitable environment. How wide is the crater itself? The crater itself, let's see, it's something like 25 miles wide. So it's easy to actually land in there? Yes, we can land in a little ellipse. The probability, we're confident that we can land within about a 10 kilometer radius ellipse. So you've got a spaceship that's up there. It drops a second spaceship below it before the picture of that. And then on the second spaceship, that's where the rover is. It drops the rover. It drops the rover and the rover lands gently. And then it'll start deploying all of its bits and pieces so that it can wake up and take a look around it and figure out where exactly it is. OK, let's go and see the other candidates for the landing site. And then you'll tell me your favorite. And I'll tell you my favorite. So this is a region called Northeast Certis. It's very close to Jezero, actually. And it's rather than being this beautiful crater with the preserved delta in, it's a very ancient site that we anticipate being able to find stacked layers of rock that have been altered by water in various means. So we're looking down on some of the features we can see here. And on the left-hand side is a little cross section if you were to walk up to it in the field there, you might see these stacked layers on top of one another. So the crater retaining cap could be a volcanic unit. But beneath that, there are geologic units that we've seen from orbit that we know the composition of. So there's this olivine carbonate unit, which is on the side of a mesa in the graphic where it says cap. That's actually like a maze, like a table mounted. The slopes of that maze are very steep. And that favors exposure, recent exposure, because you know how boulders fall off the side of steep slopes. It exposes fresh surfaces, which would be a place to go and look for biosignatures. Because very ancient surfaces, biosignatures would be destroyed by the harsh environment of Mars. So we want to go and look at steep slopes. Below that, again, is an olivine carbonate unit. And also the iron magnesium smectite, that's clay, again, needs water to form. Then there's this megabretcher unit, which is the little blotchy, pale blotches in the center of the square there, which is a kilometer by a kilometer. These are vestiges of the formation of the very large Isidus impact basin. So it's very ancient rock. We can go up and look at that, see what that can tell us about the very ancient environment of Mars, which is when it would have been habitable. And then there are these raised ridges, which are actually fractures related to the Isidus impact basin that have been later, we think, mineralized by filled by mineralized fluids. So water fluxing through there, nutrient rich, another great place to look at for potential biosignatures. So it just has a fair amount of diversity on the topography there. Yes, very diverse in a very small area, which is great, because you don't want to spend a long time driving places. There's more potential for mishaps that happen a long way. If you've got everything in a very compact area, that's really favorable. That's one kilometer, as opposed to, what did you say, the other, the? Jezero crater itself. 23 miles. Yeah, and the ellipse that we land in is 10 by, roughly 10, 10 by 10. 10 by 10 miles. Kilometers, sorry. Kilometers. So six miles. So this is much smaller, the second one here. The ellipse, the landing area is about the same, but they're focusing in on this particular region here as one of the key spots that are going to happen. It was not green. No, it's not. I didn't have the compositional information on that one, yeah. OK, let's go to the third. So the third one is Columbia Hills, which is, we've been to before. This is where this. Look at tire tracks. Yes, that's exactly right. This is the, these are wheel tracks of the Spirit Rover that landed in Columbia Hills. And what it found there was so interesting that there's a large section of the community that they want to go back there. Columbia Hills, the area itself was an impact crater that turned out to be a very degraded, filled with lava, but very degraded lava plain. So Spirit drove off to the hills that it could see on the horizon. And this turned out to be really interesting. There was some volcanic deposits there. And then highlighted on this slide, which was presented by a colleague Steve Ruff at the last landing site workshop, is this opaline silica outcrop. It looks like nothing much. I mean, it's really not a very big outcrop. But as you zoom in and look at it with instruments, these are actually on the right. These are images from the field there, from Spirit Rover. When you look in very, very fine detail, you see these very strange shapes, these nodular morphologies. We know of a not organic material that this is rock. Yeah, yeah, silica rich material. We know that opaline silica in terrestrial environments is produced at hot spring hydrothermal locations. And actually, if you look at some of the deposits in, I mean, we know that hydrothermal locations are teeming with microbial life. So this is a very interesting spot to go back to. If you look at these little silica features in very under a microscope here on Earth, we see that they're actually microbial. Ah, so there's microbial involvement in those structures. So what strikes me is if you've already been there and it's dynamic, but it isn't dynamic, then you would have the benefit of seeing the changes from the earlier Rover. Actually, that's a really interesting point. One of the other reasons to go back is to go and find Spirit Rover and look at what 17 years of exposure in the Martian environment has done to it. And that actually addresses another of the objectives of this mission is to, which I didn't get to before, but it's to prepare for humans to go to Mars. So understand the environment, understand the radiation environment. What has Spirit suffered and what would humans suffer during prolonged exposure on the surface of Mars? So what's your pick, Sarah? I, you know, I'm a volcanologist. So I should like Columbia Hills because it's volcanic terrain. But I really like Jezero. I think it's, you know, the morphology, the geology there is so clear that I would love to go there. There's also some lava flows at Jezero, which would satisfy my volcanology urges, but I like Jezero. Any chance you can stow away and sort of slip into the spaceship and, no. It's helpful. Okay. Well, okay. And I agree with you. I like Jezero too. That struck me and maybe it was the green collar. It looked like a better location. What's wrong with you? Any one of these would be great. I mean, I like the idea of going to somewhere new, but any one of them, I think we can handily meet all of the mission objectives. This is great. I hope you'll come back and talk some more about how this evolves as a plan. We haven't examined all the aspects, of course, but we need to study it more. It's coming out of Hawaii. So important that we have participation and we are in the center of this scientific effort. That's terrific. Thank you. Thank you, Jezero.